Posts Tagged ‘Ed Miliband’

Another week, Labour ahead of the Tories once again in most polls, except those the Beeb and the rest of the lamestream media pay attention to, and once again the Blairites in the party are threatening to leave. According to yesterday’s and today’s papers, it’s all about the anti-Semitism, you see. Again. I caught a glimpse of the Beeb’s news today, and it showed the far-right islamophobic hate group, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism once again camped outside parliament, or Labour HQ, waving their lying placards against ‘anti-Semitism’. While inside parliament, the Thatcherite entryists were all ready to up sticks and leave if Jenny Formby doesn’t satisfy them that enough is being done to tackle anti-Semitism.

But this isn’t about anti-Semitism. Never has been. And the row erupted long before Corbyn was elected leader of the party. On Sunday, when the threats were first made, Mike put up a piece reproducing the Tweets of CremantCommunarde, who showed very clearly that it all blew up when the Jewish Ed Miliband was leader of the Labour party. He was accused of anti-Semitism, despite his Jewish heritage and conspicuous absence of genuine Jew-hatred, because he had dared to recognize Palestine as an independent state. Veteran actress Maureen Lipman left the party in disgust. Just as she claimed to have left the party in disgust last year because Corbyn is an anti-Semite. Except that he isn’t, and has worked tirelessly to counter all forms of racism, including genuine anti-Semitism. Being pro-Palestine does not mean hating Jews, or even Israelis. It means attacking a bigoted, racist state imposing apartheid and a slow genocide on the indigenous population. A state that was set up as part of imperialist machinations by us and then maintained and supported for geopolitical reasons to maintain western, US and UK, dominance in the region.

As for the people angrily denouncing anti-Semitism in the Labour party, their true moral stature is shown by their own actions. Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks a few years ago led a contingent of British Jews to Jerusalem to participate in the March of the Flags. This is an ultra-nationalist occasion where right-wing Jewish Israeli thugs parade through the Muslim quarter of the Holy City vandalizing Palestinian property and threatening and intimidating its people. The same people claiming Corbyn is the next thing to Adolf Hitler included the kind of people one Jewish Israeli scholar called ‘Judaeonazis’. Like the couple who decided that they would show their racial tolerance by wearing T-shirts with the symbol of a banned Fascist Israeli terrorist group, Kach. As well as members of the Jewish Defence League and other Zionists, who mix easily and unashamedly with the EDL and various unsavoury characters from Britain First. The kind of people who, if they were not Jews and not connected with Israel, would automatically be denounced by everyone as Fascists and Nazis.

And now the Blairites are trying to use the pretext that Labour is riddled with genuine Jew-haters to threaten once again to split the party and leave. Just like the ‘Chicken Coup’ plotters threatened to do a few years ago. And then again a little later, when the media reported that they would leave the party to join a new centrist, pro-EU party that was being formed. A party that boasted the backing of millionaire corporate donors. An exciting new party that has since fizzled out and vanished without a trace.

But never mind! We are reliably informed by a corrupt, mendacious media, that there are more than six right-wing Labour MPs ready to depart. And Vince Cable is hoping they’ll come over and join his gang of morally corrupt corporatists and sell-outs in the Lib Dems.

The right-wing Labour MPs supposedly ready to depart aren’t really upset because they honestly believe that Corbyn’s an anti-Semite. They’re upset because they’re Blairites, Thatcherite entryists, who believe in continuing her poisonous, destructive policies of privatization, outsourcing, the destruction of the welfare state, and selling the NHS off to private healthcare firms. And destroying the trade unions in the name of creating a cowed workforce ready to accept any kind of work, no matter how ill-paid or precarious. A party so enamoured of the corporate elite that they eagerly took their donations and then gave the chairmen of these companies and senior management positions in government. All in the name of creating a properly business-friendly environment, introducing the alleged greater expertise and efficiency of private industry, creating a fluid labour market. And generally rewarding the corporate elite, who also offered them not just donations but nice, lucrative places on their boards when they left office.

Corbyn threatens all that, because he believes in a genuinely socialist Labour party, overseeing a mixed economy where the utilities, including the railways and water industry. A Britain whose working people are properly served by strong unions and have job security and rights at work from day one. A Britain whose poor are supported by decent benefits, where the jobless don’t have to wait weeks or months for welfare payments, and where a quarter of a million people aren’t forced to use food banks to stop themselves from starving in misery. A Britain where the disabled aren’t deprived of the support they need because they’ve been found ‘fit for work’ by a rigged system of tests, based on pseudo-scientific bogus theories. In other words, everything that threatens the Tories’ and Blair’s precious, poisonous Thatcher revolution.

That’s really why the Blairites have been trying to undermine Corbyn from day one. It’s why the press and people like Joan Ryan have been sneering at him and his supporters as Trotskyites, Communists and Stalinists, and why they are so desperate to claim that he’s unpopular and that he’ll never get elected by the general public. Because he threatens the Blairite policy of taking over the ideology and policies of the Tory party. Because they’re scared that he will get elected, and the Thatcherite policies they admire uncritically will be consigned to the dustbin.

I’ve had enough of their constant attempts to undermine a democratically elected and popular leader, as well as their disdain and contempt for the party’s grassroots and this country’s working people as a whole. I’m sick of them constantly threatening to leave, only to stay in the party to threaten to leave again later, whenever they feel they can do the most damage. Or whenever they think anyone will back them. I just now want them to go. They’re Conservatives anyway, and really don’t have any place in a party that genuinely supports working people instead of the corporate elite.

But as Mike has pointed out on his blog, they won’t. Because the moment they resign the party whip, their constituents will vote against them at the next election. And so they’re determined to hang on, all the while fraudulently claiming that they’re the really Labour party and whining about ‘Labour values’. They aren’t really Labour, and the party’s real values go back to Clement Attlee, Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan and the Webbs and Fabians. Genuine socialists, whose achievements Blair and his cronies have done their best to destroy.

They should now either leave for good, or shut up and support their leader. But whatever they do, it’s going to be glaringly clear to an increasing number of people that, despite their lies, they’re not interested in anti-Semitism. They’re only using it as ploy to destroy Corbyn for the same reasons as the press and the Tories they claim to want to defeat electorally.

Here’s another interesting snippet from Hitler’s Table-Talk (Oxford: OUP 1988). The Daily Mail is rightly notorious for having supported the Nazis and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the period before the Second World War. It’s why it’s got the unaffectionate nickname the Heil, from the Nazi salute.

And every so often that past comes back to bite them. Several times over the past few years the peeps on the internet have dug out articles from the rag from the 1930s supporting the Fascists to show what a vile newspaper it is. They did when the paper tried to attack the former Labour leader Ed Miliband, by running an article smearing his father, the respected Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband, as ‘the Man Who Hated Britain’. Miliband was a Jewish refugee from Belgium, who fled here from the Nazis. And while he hated British capitalism, its class system and the public schools, he joined the army and fought bravely to defend this country against Nazi tyranny. Unlike the father or grandfather of former Mail editor, Paul Dacre, who was well out of the line of fire as a domestic showbiz correspondent.

The Mail also got sharply reminded of its anti-Semitic past when it again tried smearing another Labour leader, Miliband’s successor, Jeremy Corbyn, as an anti-Semite. And then two months ago Private Eye had fun when it revealed that the newspaper had spiked an article on a 1930s German tennis star, who had opposed the Nazis. This courageous athlete had been blackballed by the Wimbledon tennis club because he was gay. And the people, who led the campaign included Dacre’s father and Geordie Greig, the present editor of the paper. It also revealed that Greig’s father or grandfather was also a member of one of Oswald Mosley’s wretched think tanks, founded to spread Fascist and corporate state thought.

Hitler had personally met the Heil’s notorious owner, Lord Rothermere, several times, and mentions the support the newspaper magnate had given him in his after dinner conversation, which was recorded in the pages of the Table-Talk. The Fuhrer said

The first time the Princess ___ visited me, she brought a letter from Rothermere. I asked Neurath if he considered it advisable for me to receive her. His reply was that, if we could get Rothermere on our side, it would be a terrific accomplishment; and that, at all costs, I must hear what she had to say. When the scarecrow appeared, I muttered “For God and Fatherland” and braced myself to receive her.

In his letter Rothermere said he would gladly use his Press to further a rapprochement between Britain and Germany. We subsequently exchanged a series of letter, one of which was very important. I had written to Rothermere to say that I had no grounds for hostility towards Italy, and that I considered Mussolini to be an outstanding personality; that if the British thought they could ride roughshod over a man like Mussolini, they were greatly mistaken; that he was the incarnation of the spirit of the Italian people (in those days I still had illusions about the Italians); that attempts to strangle Italy were futile; and that Italy, as Germany had done before her, would look after herself, and finally, that Germany could be no party to any action directed against Italy or Italian interests.

Thereupon Rothermere came over to see me, and the Princess accompanied him. I must admit I prefer a friendly little kitchen wench to a politically minded lady! Nevertheless, the fact remains-the attitude of the Daily Mail at the time of our re-occupation of the Rhineland was of great assistance to us, as it was also over the question of our naval programme. All the British of the Beaverbrook-Rothermere circle came to me and said: “in the last war we were on the wrong side.” Rothermere told me that he and Beaverbrook were in complete agreement that never again should there be war between Britain and Germany. (p. 685).

The Heil always has been a viciously right-wing, racist rag, and Hitler appreciated the support it, and the press barons Beaverbrook and Rothermere had given him. Its claims to support this country against immigrants and the Left are grotesque and disgusting. In the 1970s various Tories, including the Times, were considering launching a coup to overthrow the minority Labour government of time. I’ve no doubt that if Corbyn did get into power, the Mail would also enthusiastically support anyone who would try to overthrow him. They’d smear him as a Communist and Trotskyite to justify the coup, of course, just as the Americans have smeared as Communists the democratically elected Socialist and left-wing leaders of the foreign governments they’ve toppled. And the Tory BBC would be willingly complicit.

Today’s I newspaper for the 12th November 2018 also ran an article following a piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times, which suggested that the launch of the new, Blairite ‘centrist’ party is coming nearer, and that David Miliband, the brother of the former Labour leader Ed, may return to Britain to head it. The article by Richard Vaughan stated

David Miliband is mulling a return to frontline politics as head of a new centrist party, it has emerged.

Plans are under way to launch a fresh political party, with speculation mounting it could be just months away.

Labour MPs, unhappy with the direction of the party under Jeremy Corbyn, are believed to be in talks about forging a breakaway party from the centre ground and looking at Mr. Miliband to lead it.

According to the Sunday Times, the former foreign secretary is eyeing a return to London, having spent the last four years running the aid charity, the International Rescue Committee in New York.

His decision to leave UK politics followed his unexpected defeat to his brother Ed for the Labour leadership in 2010. Mr. Miliband sparked rumours of a return in the summer wyhen he said in an interview that he brought PG Tips and Marmite back to his home in the US, adding: “Of course I’ll come back. It’s my home. I’m British.”

Centrist Labour backbenchers still view Mr. Miliband as the “king over the water”, harbouring hopes that he will step back into the political limelight under a new party.

It comes amid persistent reports that Tony Blair is in discussions to create a new party, with suggestions that his one-time political apprentice could take on the job of leading it. Another favourite to lead such a party is the former business secretary Chuka Umunna, who has been one of the most vocal critics of the Labour leadership.

Should there be any chance of a new centrist party being established in time for a general election before Britain leaves the EU, then it would have to be launched before the end of January.

Under parliamentary procedure, 28 January is the latest possible date that an election can be called before Brexit day on 29 March. (p. 15).

Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s get started. Firstly, the source of this bit of speculation – and speculation is all it is, rather than news – is the Sunday Times. This is the entirely trustworthy establishment paper, owned by the honest, deeply moral newspaper magnate, Rupert Murdoch, that libeled Mike as an anti-Semite last year. And it is this paper, which is repeating the nonsensical smear that the former Labour leader, Michael Foot, was a KGB spy. Despite the fact that when they ran this story 20 or so years ago, Foot defended his name in the courts, sued ’em for libel, and won. One of the reasons the rag is repeating the smear is because Foot’s dead, and the dead can’t sue for libel. But there is no further corroborating evidence, the charge is still malicious nonsense, and the editor publishing this is still a complete slimeball. In my opinion, of course.

Now let’s attack the claims about the proposed ‘centrist’ party, which might have members from ‘centrist’ Labour MPs. Firstly, there is nothing centrist about the Labour right. They are Thatcherite infiltrators, who follow their former leader Tony Blair, in rejecting socialism and embracing Thatcherite neoliberalism. Thatcher hailed Blair as her greatest achievement. The Blairites thus stand for more privatization, including that of the NHS, and a similar attack on the welfare state and workers’ rights. Blair and his cronies continued Thatcher’s policy of ‘less eligibility’, taken over from the workhouses, to make applying for benefits as difficult and humiliating as possible in order to deter people from claiming them. And I personally know people who didn’t sign on when they unemployed, because of the degrading way they were treated. It was the Blairites too, who introduced the work capability tests for those applying for disability benefit. This was on the advice of the American insurance fraudsters, Unum, based on spurious medical research, which has been criticized as scientific nonsense. Again, this was following the Tories. Unum had been advising Peter Lilley, when he was their health secretary in the 1990s. Lilley introduced the Private Finance Initiative as a deliberate policy to open up the health service to private enterprise. And this was following Thatcher, who would have liked to privatise the NHS wholesale, but was only prevented by a cabinet revolt. As for the unemployed, the Blairites’ contempt for the jobless was clearly shown more recently when one of them – can’t remember whether it was Rachel Phillips or Reed, said a few years ago that if Labour got into power, they would be even harder on the unemployed than the Tories. Which is a very good argument for making reselection of MPs in the party mandatory.

The Labour centrists are nothing of the kind. They are actually extreme right. The real moderates are Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left, who are a return to the Social Democratic politics of the traditional Labour party. They are definitely not ‘Communists’, ‘Trotskyites’, ‘Stalinists’ or whatever other insults Joan Ryan and the press hurl at them.

Now let’s analyze this ‘centrist’ party that the press have been speculating about for nearly a year. At the moment, it has zero policies and precious few members. One of those, who was part of the project, fell out with the others and left. The early newspaper reports stated that it was being launched with the aid of donors. This should ring warning bells with everyone concerned with the corruption of today’s corporate state. Blair’s Labour party was a part of the corporate takeover of politics. They took funds from corporate donors, like David Sainsbury, and put them into government posts, where they influenced government policy to their benefit. George Monbiot describes the way this corrupted the Labour government and its policies in his book, Captive State. It looks like the centrist party, if it is ever launched, will be intended to maintain the dominance of corporate power over the political parties, against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party, which has actually expanded its membership to become the largest socialist party in Europe and which actually represents the wishes of grassroots members. Its other policy seems to be that Britain should remain in the EU. I believe this, but the party otherwise represents too much of a threat to ordinary people’s lives, health and livelihoods to ever be worth voting for.

The party’s Blairite foundations also mean it is going to be Atlanticist in geopolitical orientation. That is, it will support America and American policies. Blair and the other architects of New Labour were members of BAP, or the British-American Project for the Successor Generation. This was a Reaganite project to recruit future political and media leaders, give them sponsored study trips to America, so that they would return staunch supporters of the Atlantic alliance. Blair’s pro-American stance could clearly be seen by the way many of the companies lining up to run Britain’s privatized industries or manage what was left of the state sector, including the NHS, were American. Miliband is part of this. I really don’t think it’s any accident that he scarpered off to America after he lost the leadership contest to his brother. And Blair’s own extreme right-wing views is shown by the fact that he accepted an invitation to attend an American Conservative convention at the request of former president George Bush.

The other policy is likely to be staunch support for Israel and its continuing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. I don’t know who Jonathan Goldstein is, but one of the possible funders of the new party, Trevor Chinn, was revealed a few months ago as one of the big donors to the Israeli lobby in the Labour party, giving money to Labour Friends of Israel. He’s one of the people behind the Israel lobbyists and their smears of anyone standing up for the Palestinians as anti-Semites. These smears are vile, libelous and deeply offensive. Those smeared as anti-Semites include not just non-Jewish anti-racists, like Mike, but also self-respecting secular and Torah-observant Jews, like Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni, Tony Greenstein and so on. Some of those they’ve smeared are the children of Holocaust survivors, and people, who’ve suffered real racist and anti-Semitic attacks.

If launched, this supposedly centrist party will represent nothing but corporate greed, especially of transatlantic multinationals. Oh yes, and support for the Likudniks and other members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly Fascistic government coalition, and their persecution of Israel’s indigenous Arabs. It will not support the welfare state, the NHS or the rights of British working people to decent jobs, working conditions, dignity and pay.

That’s if this wretch party ever gets launched at all. It’s been debated for about year now, and the Labour right have been threatening to desert the party and found a new one for even longer. So far, fortunately, they haven’t done so. And it’s possible they never will. Mike over at Vox Political published a piece a little while ago pointing out that new parties find it very difficult to establish themselves as major forces in politics. UKIP was founded in the 1990s, and despite decades of hard campaigning, it’s still -fortunately – pretty much a fringe party. And some of us can remember the Labour party split in the 1980s, when the right-wing rebels left to form the SDP. There was much noise then about them ‘breaking the mould’ of British politics. The result was that they had no more than a handful of MPs, and after forming an alliance with the Liberals then merged with them to become the Lib Dems. Which remains smaller than either Labour or the Tories.

As for right-wing Labour MPs splitting off on their own, Mike showed very clearly why they wouldn’t really want to do that, either. Independents also struggle to get themselves elected. If they ever left the party to run as independents, they’d almost certainly lose their seats at the next election.

The centrist party will thus very likely be a complete non-starter, funded by businessmen to maintain their power over British politics at the expense of the NHS, the welfare state and working people, and preserve British alliance with right-wing parties and business elites in America and Israel. But it is being touted by the newspapers like the Sunday Times and the I, because they fear and hate Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, and see it as a way of destroying it and the chance of real change for working people in this country.

This is another piece from Private Eye, which shows you once again how grotty the Daily Mail and its sister paper, the Mail on Sunday are, and their historic links with Fascism and anti-Semitism.

Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, resigned last week to start a new job elsewhere in the company. He was succeeded by Geordie Grieg, who was previously the editor of the Mail on Sunday. This fortnight’s Private Eye for 15th-28th June 2018 therefore carried a special, two-page article paying suitable tribute to him and his editorship of the rag, on pages 8 and 9. On page 9, in the section ‘Good Sports Finally Agree’, the Eye describes how both Dacre and Grieg spiked a story about a 1930s German tennis player, Baron Gottfried von Cramm. Von Cramm was an opponent of the Nazis, and was imprisoned by them for having a gay affair. The Mail was considering running a story about this courageous and principled man, up to the point when one of its staff noticed a few lines in the article describing how he had been banned from participating in the 1939 Wimbledon tournament by the All England Club. One of those pushing for the ban was Harold, the first Viscount Rothermere. And so to avoid embarrassing the current Viscount Rothermre, the piece was spiked.

The story was then picked up the Mail on Sunday, which was also considering publishing it, until a hack dug up another connection between events then and the MoS’ editor. It turns out that the president of the All-England Club at the time von Cramm was banned was one Louis Grieg, Geordie Grieg’s grandfather. Who was also a member of Oswald Mosley’s January Club. And so the story was spiked again. This sorry tale was revealed, according to the Eye, in the ‘Mandrake’ column of the New European.

The Mail is infamous for the backing it gave Oswald Mosley’s legions with the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. One of the great left-wing bloggers, I think it was Tom Pride at Pride’s Purge, a few years ago posted up the various headlines and articles the paper had run in the 1930s raving about Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, Mosley and fulminating against Jewish immigration. This was after the Mail did a hatchet piece on Ed Miliband, the then head of the Labour party, which attacked him through his father. The article was headlined ‘The Man Who Hated Britain’, and sought to portray Ralph Miliband, a Jewish Belgian immigrant and an important Marxist thinker, as someone who despised his adopted country. Well, he certainly despised its class institutions, like the public schools and monarchy, but as Tom Pride’s piece revealed, Miliband senior did his patriotic duty like millions of other people, and served in the army fighting the Nazis.

This was in sharp contrast to Dacre’s father or grandfather, I can’t remember which, who spent the war as a showbiz or society correspondent. So, more hypocrisy from the Mail. This won’t surprise anyone, as the Mail’s always been hypocritical in its nasty attitudes.

With all these murky little family secrets about their predecessors’ extreme right-wing views, the editors of the Mail and Mail on Sunday have got no business libelling anyone on the Left as anti-Semites or Holocaust Deniers.

It was Luciana Berger, who found that comment by Jeremy Corbyn from 2012, commiserating with the graffiti artist, whose picture had been censored because of anti-Semitism. This was the picture, you remember, that showed six white bankers dealing over a table resting on the bodies of Blacks. The comment formed the basis of the renewed attacks on Jeremy Corbyn for anti-Semitism two weeks ago, despite the fact that Corbyn has said he hadn’t properly looked at the painting and didn’t really know what was going on. But it’s also moot how anti-Semitic the painting actually was. Only two of the bankers portrayed were Jewish. These included Rothschild, obviously, but the other four were gentiles, and included Rockefeller. At the time, the Jewish Chronicle only said that the painting had an ‘anti-Semitic undertone’. Now, six years later, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council worked themselves up into a bug-eyed frenzy to denounce the mural and Corbyn as anti-Semitic. It’s entirely faux outrage. The BDJ and Jewish Leadership Council hate Corbyn, not because he is anti-Semitic – he isn’t, and they probably know it – but because he is genuinely anti-racist and supports the Palestinians from his commitment to fighting racial injustice. Israel was founded on massacre, apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and its policies towards the Palestinians are indefensible, except by attacking the country’s critics as anti-Semites. And so that’s what the Israel lobby – the Board, Jewish Leadership Council, Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Labour Friends of Israel, Jewish Labour Movement – has done.

I found this brief description of Berger and her political career in Private Eye for 18th – 31st March 2011, in the ‘New Boys and Girls’ column. This is the column that gives brief descriptions of the careers and activities of new members of parliament, who have recently been elected. Here’s what the Eye had to say about Berger.

She may recently have been voted the most fanciable member of parliament, and since being elected as Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree last year she has developed a drooling fan club of sad, middle-aged men in the Commons – but looks deceive.

Twenty-eight year old Lucian Berger is what the comrades used to describe as “right operator” . Within a few months of her arrival, Ed Miliband had already promoted her to the frontbench as a shadow minister for energy and climate change.

Her swift climb up the greasy pole began soon after she left the Haberdasher Aske’s School for Girls and went to Birmingham University, where she became an executive member of the National Union of Students, convening national anti-racism campaigns. She resigned in 2005, accusing the NUS of taking a lax attitude to anti-Semitism on university campuses.

She later took up a “public affairs” post at Accenture and went on to advise the NHS Confederation, but not before the rumour mill had come alive with talk of a relationship with Euan Blair after the pair were pictured at a party. Denials came thick and fast, not only from Blair but also from the Labour party, which took it upon itself to issue an official statement saying that young Luciana “was not, and had never been” romantically linked with Euan Blair.

One of her predecessors in the Liverpool Wavertree seat, the late Terry Fields, might have doffed his fireman’s helmet to her for the at she managed to get selected in the first place, for it came straight out of the old Militant Tendency’s instruction manual. While Labour was choosing its candidate, Berger lived for about a month at the home of Jane Kennedy, then the sitting MP, whose partner was the Labour official who ran the selection process, Peter Dowling. The completed ballot papers were then returned to Kennedy’s home address for counting.

A furious Frank Hont, secretary of the regional branch of the Unison trade union, lodged protests with party bosses, to no avail. Although veteran Liverpool Walton MP Peter Kilfoyle branded her a “student politician” who lacked the experience to do the job, Berger went on to beat Liverpool councillors Wendy Simon and Joyce Still by a margin of around 2-1 to win the candidacy on an “all-wimmin” shortlist. By this time, Berger was in a relationship with the MP and journalist Sion Simon, who was shortly to stand down from parliament to devote his energies to becoming mayor of Birmingham. The pair were talked of as a new “power couple”.

Berger didn’t improve her stock with incandescent Scousers by committing a series of gaffes that would have sunk a less shameless candidate. In January 2010, the Liverpool Echo tested Berger with a four minute quiz on Liverpool live and history. She scored two out of four, not knowing who performed “Ferry Cross the Mersey” and not recognising the name of former Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly.

In her defence, Berger said that “you can’t ask a girl a football question” and added: “I’m not new to the city. I’ve been coming here for the past decade through all different jobs.” It is difficult to know what caused more offence, Berger’s failure to have heard of Shankly or her reference to coming to the city “through all different jobs” – jobs, after all, being a commodity in short supply in Merseyside.

For a while it looked as though she would be given a run for her money at the election by Scouse actor and former union activist Ricky Tomlinson, who announced that he would stand for the Socialist Labour Party under the election slogan “Berger-my arse!” – but then wimped out because of “personal and contractual obligations”.

Once in parliament, Berger’s ability to upset local sensitivities continued. Last October she infuriated Liverpudlians by appearing on a Radio Five Live show with Kelvin MacKenzie, who was editor of the Sun at the time of the Hillsborough disaster and whose coverage of the story led to a boycott of the paper on Merseyside that lasts to this day. Berger’s lame defence was that she “didn’t know who the other guests were”.

With yet another little local difficulty somehow shrugged off, Luciana has also shrugged off Sion Simon and is now romantically involved with an equally ambitious Chuka Umunna, who has been dubbed “the British Obama”. With the pair already being talked of as a new “power couple”, let’s hope the Labour party doesn’t go and spoil things again by issuing a denial.
(p. 9).

She comes across very much as a typical New Labour politico – young, fiercely ambitious, very middle class and with a signal lack of interest in her constituency. Remember how Blair had various Tory defectors parachuted into safe Labour seats, ordering the sitting MPs to give way for them. The Tory defectors were immensely wealthy people, with very grand houses in London, and absolutely no connection to the constituencies they were given.

She sounds genuinely concerned about attacking anti-Semitism, but that doesn’t change the fact that the allegations against Corbyn and his supporters are grossly fraudulent and libellous. It just means she’s either very cynical as well, or that she really does believe that criticism of Israel equals Jew hatred.

And the circumstances of her selection as the official Labour candidate is so, er, irregular, that it could come from Stalin himself. ‘It’s not who votes that counts,’ said the old thug, ‘it’s who counts the votes.’ Quite.

It’s also highly ironic that she was propelled to the front bench by Ed Miliband. This is the Labour leader Maureen Lipman denounced as an anti-Semite, and claimed his election as leader forced her to leave the party. Miliband is of Jewish heritage, and in any case, anti-Semites don’t promote Jews to leading positions in politics. Lipman’s talking nonsense, but I’m sure you knew that already.

Her background with Accenture, formerly Anderson Consulting, shows that she is very definitely New Labour, with its orientation to the aspirational middle class and ideology focussed on privatisation and cutting welfare benefits. When Blair came to power, he did so with a plan prepared by Anderson Consulting, which the Tories had just thrown in the bin. She manifestly does not represent the working class, who New Labour ignored and took for granted. When Gordon Brown didn’t attack them as ‘feckless’ and responsible for their own problems, of course.

Her attack on Corbyn is all about undermining the Labour leader and preventing a return of real socialism, while advancing her own career as a leading Blairite in parliament.

On Sunday, the deliberately misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism held a rally outside the Labour Party’s HQ, protesting against the party’s anti-Semitism and demanding the removal of Jeremy Corbyn. The CAA’s leader, Gideon Falter, declared that Corbyn had made the party a haven for anti-Semites and Holocaust Deniers.

As Falter knows, or should know, this is a flat-out lie. Corbyn has always campaigned against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. And the stats from his own wretched organisation show that under Corbyn’s leadership, anti-Semitism in the Labour party has actually fallen. It’s now lower than in other parties, such as the Tories, and wider British society, where it has actually risen.

But the CAA aren’t worried about such inconvenient things as facts. They’re true-blue Tories to a man and woman, and the organisation’s real purpose has absolutely nothing to do with combating anti-Semitism. They’re a pro-Israel outfit, who use the standard Zionist tactic of smearing the country’s critics as anti-Semites when they make awkward criticisms of it and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. This treatment includes apartheid, massacre and ethnic cleansing. But any mention of this, even by respected journalists, is rigorously policed and suppressed by the Israel lobby, who accuse those reporting it or commenting on it as anti-Semites. In the past, those reporters, who have been so attacked have included the Beeb’s Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin. And also Jonathan Dimbleby, when he made a comment objecting to the smears against his colleagues.

This alone shows how the anti-Semitism smears are a real, political witch-hunt, of the type Arthur Miller described in his classic play, The Crucible. This used the 17th century Salem witch hunt as a metaphor for the McCarthy witch hunts against suspected Communists in ’50s America. Which is also appropriate, given the way various speakers at the CAA rally seemed to be convinced that he was another Marxist.

In fact, the numbers who turned up for the CAA’s rally were small. There were no more than 250 of them, which is about the entire membership of the CAA plus a few of their mates. So, hardly a mass movement showing widespread discontent against the Labour leader.

And Falter also crossed the line when he demanded Corbyn’s removal. The CAA is registered as a charity. Under the rules of the Charity Commission, registered organisations have to be non-political. But the CAA has clearly broken this regulation by demanding the Labour leader’s removal. As a result, Tony Greenstein, a long-time critic of Israel, who has also been smeared as an anti-Semite by the Israel lobby, posted up on his website yesterday a new post about the internet petition requesting the Charity Commission to remove it as a registered charity. 5,000 people had signed it so far. Mr Greenstein was hoping this would double by the end of this week.

The CAA’s pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian agenda was inadvertently demonstrated by comic actress Maureen Lipman, who spread her own lies and falsehoods at the rally. Lipman turned up with a placard saying ‘Corbyn Made Me a Tory’, and made a speech in which she claimed that she had left the Labour party because of Jeremy Corbyn. Whoops! No, she didn’t!. She left the Labour party in 2014 after the election of Ed Miliband as leader. This was because ‘Red’ Ed had also proposed some pro-Palestinian policies. She was complaining then about how his election showed that Labour was anti-Semitic. Hardly. Most people would probably argue otherwise, as Miliband is of Jewish heritage. For some people, some of the attacks on him and his father, Ralph, such as those of the Daily Mail, also had very nasty anti-Semitic overtones. As Mike’s article on this shows, the internet has been having immense fun with Lipman’s selective memory. Jokes about her include the suggestion that she has a time machine to go back to Ed Miliband’s election, so she could resign then in protest against Corbyn’s election.

Lipman also let the cat out of the bag about the real, underlying reason for the protests against Corbyn. She attacked him for always criticising Israel, and sticking up for the Palestinians. This is exactly the reason behind these allegations, and the pressure on the Labour party to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that defines as including criticism of Israel. This is despite the fact that Wilhelm Marr, the noxious German politico, who founded modern anti-Semitism in the 19th century and who coined the term, defined it solely as hatred of Jews as Jews.

I’m not surprised Lipman turned up at the rally. She has appeared in the press making noises about how Corbyn is a supporter of ‘terrorism’. She said it a month or so ago in an interview in the pages of the Radio Times. At the rally, she also claimed that Corbyn was a Marxist, who was trying to bring it back because it had worked so well in the rest of the world.

As so many people have pointed out, including Mike over at Vox Political and this blog, Corbyn isn’t a Marxist. He’s actually centre left, closer to the social democratic consensus which advocated a mixed economy, strong trade unions and social mobility. George Galloway despatched the accusation that Corbyn was a Marxist a year or so ago. The Scots political maverick stated that he’d known Corbyn for a very long time, and he wasn’t. But why let inconvenient facts get in the way of a good, Tory and Blairites smear?

The accusation that Corbyn’s a Marxist says nothing about him, but it says plenty about Lipman and her supporters. Rather than being a ‘disenfranchised socialist’ as she claimed, she comes across as another Blairite, worried that Blair’s policy of handing large sections of the state over to private industry is now going to be stopped by Corbyn. Communism didn’t work, although the capitalism that succeeded it in Russia hasn’t made things any better for ordinary people over there either. And neoliberal capitalism is failing here. It has brought ordinary working people in Britain and across the world nothing but poverty, starvation and hardship, all for the profit of big business and the immensely rich. Corbyn’s right to end it.

The CAA’s rally on Sunday was a pathetic affair, at which they just spewed the usual accusations against the Labour leader, all in support of the real reason for wanting his removal: to continue the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians without criticism, and keep the Blairite neoliberals in control of the Labour party. It’s depressing to see Maureen Lipman supporting them, as normally I have a lot of respect for her. But all too often you find that people you respect have monstrous or repulsive views in some area or another, and Lipman is no different.

I’m really delighted that the American progressive news service, The Young Turks, sent their girl Nomiki Konst over here to cover the Labour party conference. In this clip Konst talks to the Guardian journalist, Abi Wilkinson, and Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder and editor of the Jacobin magazine. With the election of Jeremy Corbyn, membership of the Labour part has exploded. In America there’s been a similar rise in people joining the DSA – the Democratic Socialists of America.

The programme explains how the DSA only dates from the 1970s, while the Labour party over here in Britain dates from the beginning of the last century. However, as Wilkinson explains, the party drifted to the right under Tony Blair’s New Labour, which made it much less Socialist, dropping Clause 4, the part of the Constitution which demanded the nationalisation of the means of production. She states that membership of the Labour party started to grow again after Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader, despite no-one expecting him to win. Corbyn followed ‘Red’ Ed Miliband, who she says was personally more left-wing than his policy platform. But he was told that you couldn’t win on a left-wing platform. In America, Socialist ideas have become far more popular thanks to Bernie Sanders in the Democrat party, just like Corbyn over here has popularised them in Labour.

Konst raises the issue of whether left-wing policies, like the NHS and a welfare safety net, are more acceptable here than in America. She feels they are, but Wilkinson states that if the NHS was set up now, there’d be much more opposition to it, with demands for means testing and debates about whether it was affordable. She states that it was in the 1940s that the great ideas for massive reform and big programmes became acceptable.

Konst then turns to Sunkara. Sunkara states that when he founded Jacobin, after the French revolutionary party, the number of socialists he knew were only about a thousand. Now their readership is up to 40,000. He and his friends founded the magazine, despite the small size of its prospective readership, because they found socialist ideas so powerful. He also says that, as far as the writing style for the magazine went, he wanted it to be written in an accessible style like Conservative mags like the Economist. He states that you can read the Economist without knowing or having read anything by Adam Smith. So he wants ordinary working people to be able to read Jacobin without having read anything by Marx. He feels that this is important, as many left-wing magazines and publications he feels talk down to their less educated readers from the working class.

He states that he is somewhat concerned about whether or not the growth of his readership represents a genuine increase in the number of people turning to socialism in America, or whether it just means that they’re reaching more of that niche, in a market that is heavily personalised.

The three talk briefly about the relationship between left-wing parties and the trade unions. Wilkinson states that the Labour party has always had strong links with the unions, and asks if it isn’t true that the Democrats have also had trade union funding, to get a negative or non-committal answer from Konst. She also states how the Scum and the other right-wing papers have tried to break the power of the unions by working up resentment and jealousy against them through publishing the salaries of trade union officials and commenting on how much larger they are than ordinary salaries.

As for the reasons for the growth in Labour party membership and the turn to the Left, Wilkinson states that it’s because of the poverty generated by the past decades of free market policies. This is not only affecting the working class, but also other parts of the population, so that 75 per cent of young people vote or support Labour.

The three also discuss the problems in magazine publishing caused by the decline of the press. Within three years of the crash in America, 800 newspapers had folded, and even the big national newspapers were feeling the pinch. The result of this has been a press that is aimed at the lowest common reader, and entire news networks have been built on this, like Fox News. Thus, Americans were deprived of news at the local level, which would have informed them how bad the political situation really was. Like the Democrats had lost 1,000 seats, and the Koch brothers were engaged in a massive funding campaign at the local level to push through extreme right-wing policies.

In Britain the majority of the press is right-wing, including the Scum, whose readers regard themselves as working class. Konst asks Sunkara whether he has any politicos reading his magazine. He says they’ve a few local senators, and one or two at a national level. Wilkinson states that the Morning Star, a Socialist paper well to the left of the Guardian or Independent, held a fringe event at the Labour conference. Speakers at this event included Diane Abbott, Richard Burgon and another member of the Shadow Cabinet.

This is a very optimistic interview, and I hope this optimism is born out by a Labour victory over here, and the takeover of the Democrat party by progressives and their victory over the Republicans at the next presidential election.

Go Bernie!
Go Jeremy!
And go the working men and women of America and Britain!

The Real News Network is another great alternative news service that’s on the net. Like RT, it’s actually doing proper journalism and showing just how corrupt and unjust contemporary politics is under neoliberalism in the West. In this video, Shir Hever from Heidelberg talks to Moshe Machower, an Israeli professor and anti-Zionist activist, about his expulsion from the Labour party. Hever states that the allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour party started shortly after Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader, and that it has become clear that they don’t have any basis in reality. They are a device to smear critics of Israel. There’s a brief clip of Jackie Walker, the Black Jewish anti-racist campaigner, who was smeared and falsely suspended as an anti-Semite because of her views on Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians, and her refusal to kowtow to the fake definition of anti-Semitism which conflates it with opposition to Israel. Walker states that the anti-Semitism smears were an entirely constructed scandal in order to bring down Corbyn.

One of the most recent victims of this witch-hunt is Professor Moshe Machower, a long time critic of Israel. Machower’s not just Jewish, but an Israeli himself. He is also a prominent mathematician and very well respected. He was expelled under the pretext that he was an anti-Semite last week because he made a very well received speech and wrote an article in the Weekly Worker making the point that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. In the article he committed the heinous crime of pointing out that the Zionist organization in Nazi Germany actually welcomed the infamous Nuremberg Laws separating ‘Aryan’ and Jewish Germans in 1937.

Machower was then approached by Labour Party Marxists, who asked if they could reprint his article in their magazine. He agreed. And this is what precipitated his expulsion. The Blairites in the party used the article’s publication by the Marxists to have him ‘autoexcluded’ without any opportunity to defend himself as a Communist infiltrator. They then used the smear that he was an anti-Semite to expel the Marxist comrades, who published the article, as anti-Semites in their turn.

Machower states that this is not about anti-Semitism. It’s just a weapon in a campaign by the Blairites in the Labour party to try to cling on to power. Under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party has expanded to become the largest political party in Europe. Not only have new, younger members joined, but also the old ‘uns, who had previously left, disillusioned with the cynicism and Tory-lite policies of Blair and his cronies. And most of the Labour party, including Jeremy Corbyn and its top leadership, are left-wing. Hence, this isn’t a struggle in which the Labour party is trying to destroy itself, as Mr. Hever asks. It’s a struggle in which the Blairites are desperately trying to expel the Left.

I’d say here while the Blairites are trying to expel the Left from the Labour party, they have shown that they have absolutely no qualms about destroying the party in doing so. Several times there have been rumours about the Blairites wishing to split the party, and local Blairite Labour party officials have even gone so far as to ask Tories and Lib Dems to join the party to help them remove left-wing, pro-Corbyn members.

This shows how desperate they are, and how actively disloyal to the party. As well, of course, as their complete lack of morals in foully smearing decent, anti-racist, Jewish and non-Jewish men and women. And as Hever and Walker comment, their smears have been picked up by the other, competing parties and organizations outside the Labour party.

But their smear and expulsion of Prof. Machower has not been without consequences. Tony Greenstein, another long-term Jewish critic of Zionism, and stout anti-racist and anti-Fascist campaigner, has put up a very interesting piece on his blog, reporting the mass anger that has erupted against Machower’s expulsion. So great is this discontent, that MacNicholl and the other Blairites behind Machower’s exclusion have invited him to present his case defending himself. This is in stark contrast to their earlier, summary expulsion.

I hope this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that the expulsion of Prof. Machower becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It should be a step too far, and should discredit not just the smears and lies against Professor Machower, but all the lying allegations of anti-Semitism against decent people in the Labour party.

There’s another article by John Booth over at the parapolitics magazine Lobster, which also makes very clear that the anti-Semitism smears are baseless lies, used by the Blairites and the Zionist lobby in the Labour party, the Labour Friends of Israel and Jewish Labour Movement, to hang on to power. And it makes very clear in its opening paragraphs just how much these allegations differ from reality by describing the Jews active in the Labour party, or who were speaking as guests as its conference last week. He writes (footnotes included)

Anyone reading and hearing about Labour’s annual conference in Brighton might have thought it riven by yet more acrimonious controversy over antisemitism. From The Guardian to the Daily Express and the broadcast journalists in between that was the big story for those critical of the party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. 1 But for those who were there or learned of it through the burgeoning alternative media, there were other impressions to be gained. The Jewish former party leader Ed Miliband appeared in relaxed mode at fringe events. 2 The keynote conference speaker was Naomi Klein, the Canadian author of Jewish descent who has done much to challenge the orthodoxies of neoliberalism and neo-conservatism. On the conference floor Jewish party 3 activist Naomi Wimbourne-Idrissi wowed delegates by her denunciation of Israeli policy on settlements and Gaza. She concluded: ‘This party does not have a problem with Jews.’ 4 Away from the formal party conference fringe, the events of the Momentum-led festival The World Transformed were routinely oversubscribed. Momentum is chaired by Jon Lansman, a former kibbutznik brought up in an Orthodox Jewish family. Later that day Wimbourne-Idrissi helped launch Jewish Voice for Labour
or 1 or <http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/858647/labour-party-conference-2017-antisemitism-jew-brighton
or 2
3
4
(JVL) alongside international jurist Sir Stephen Sedley, Oxford emeritus 5 professor Avi Shlaim (a member of the Israel Defence Forces in 1967) and David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialists’ Group. 6 A clue as to why the Corbyn-led Labour party has been dogged by antisemitism allegations can be found in comparing the words with which Rosenberg concluded his 2017 JVL address to a packed audience and one from a fundraiser for New Labour 15 years earlier. Here’s Rosenberg on Marek Edelman, the longest surviving member of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, who died in 2009: ‘This hero was persona non grata in Israel for remaining an anti-Zionist, and for saying about that incredible Uprising: “We fought for dignity and freedom. Not for a territory, nor for a national identity”. But the very most important thing he said was: “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors.”’ In contrast, this is Jon (now Lord) Mendelsohn speaking to Jewsweek.com on 8 September 2002: ‘[Tony] Blair has attacked the anti-Israelism that had existed in the Labour Party . . .Labour was cowboys-and-Indians politics, picking underdogs. The milieu has changed. Zionism is pervasive in New Labour. It is automatic that Blair will come to Friends of Israel meetings.’

Another reason for the Blairites’ hatred of Corbyn is his own personal convictions. Not only has Corbyn been active in pro-Palestinian movements, but his second wife was a refugee from Pinochet’s Chile. As Blair was quite easy about providing support to every right-wing thug while trying to mask it under liberal platitudes, it’s not surprising that Mandelson and the others should be bitterly opposed to someone who takes standing up for human rights very seriously.

For more information, see:file:///C:/Users/User/lob74-labour-corbyn-anti-semitism.pdf

This is the text of another pamphlet I wrote a year or so ago against the highly exploitative workfare industry. As the pamphlet explains, workfare, or ‘welfare to work’, is the system that provides industry with cheap, unemployed temporary labour under the guise of getting the jobless back into work by giving them work experience. If the unemployed person refuses, he or she is thrown off benefit.

These temporary jobs go nowhere, and it’s been proven that the unemployed are actually far better off looking for jobs on their own than using workfare. And it’s very similar to other systems of supposed voluntary work and forced labour, such as the labour colonies set up in Britain in 1905, the Reichsarbeitsdienst in Nazi Germany, and the use of forced labour against the ‘arbeitscheu’ – the ‘workshy’, as well as the compulsory manual labour required of all citizens in Mao’s china during the Cultural Revolution, and the Gulags in Stalin’s Russia.

Mike over at Vox Political has blogged against it, so has Johnny Void and the Angry Yorkshireman of Another Angry Voice, and many other left-wing bloggers. It’s another squalid policy which New Labour and the Tories took over from Reagan and Bill Clinton.

Jeremy Corbyn has promised to get rid of the work capability tests. I hope also that under him, the Labour party will also get rid of this vile policy, so that big corporations like Poundland and supermarkets like Tesco’s will have to take on workers and pay them a decent wage, rather than exploiting desperate and jobless workers supplied by the Thatcherite corporate state.

End Workfare Now!

Workfare is one of the most exploitative aspects of the contemporary assault on the welfare state and the unemployed. It was advocated in the 1980s by the Republicans under Ronald Reagan in America, and in Britain by Thatcher’s Conservatives. In 1979 the Tory party ranted about the need to ‘restore the will to work’. Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared that ‘The Government and the vast majority of the British people want hard work and initiative to be properly rewarded and are vexed by disincentives to work’. At its heart is the attitude that the unemployed should be forced to work for their benefits, as otherwise they are getting ‘something for nothing’. Very many bloggers and activists for the poor and unemployed, including Vox Political, Johnny Void, Another Angry Voice, and myself have denounced it as another form of slavery. It’s used to provide state-subsidised, cheap labour for big business and charities, including influential Tory donors like Sainsbury’s. And at times it crosses the line into true slavery. Under the sanctions system, an unemployed person is still required to perform workfare, even if the jobcentre has sanctioned them, so that they are not receiving benefits. Workfare recipients – or victims – have no control over where they are allocated or what jobs they do. The government was challenged in the courts by a geology graduate, who was forced to work in Poundland. The young woman stated that she did not object to performing unpaid work. She, however, had wanted to work in a museum, and if memory serves me correctly, had indeed got a place at one. She was, however, unable to take up her unpaid position there because of the Jobcentre’s insistence she labour for Poundland instead. A young man also sued the government, after he was sanctioned for his refusal to do 30 hours a week unpaid labour for six months for the Community Action Programme. The High and Appeal Courts ruled in the young people’s favour. They judged that the government had indeed acted illegally, as the law did not contain any stipulations for when and how such work was to be performed.

Iain Duncan Smith, the notorious head of the Department of Work and Pensions, was outraged. He called the decision ‘rubbish’ and said, ‘There are a group of people out there who think they are too good for this kind of stuff .. People who think it is their right take benefit and do nothing for it – those days are over.’ This is rich coming from IDS, who was taking over a million pounds in farm subsidies from the EU. Eventually, Smith got sick of the criticism he was taking for the government’s welfare policies, and flounced off early in 2016 moaning about how unfair it all was that he should get the blame, when the notorious Work Capability Tests inflicted on the elderly and disabled were introduced by New labour.

Those forced into workfare are in no sense free workers, and it similarly makes a nonsense of the pretense that this somehow constitutes ‘voluntary work’, as this has been presented by the government and some of the participating charities

The political scientist Guy Standing is also extremely critical of workfare in his book, A Precariat Charter, demanding its abolition and making a series of solid arguments against it. He states that it was first introduced in America by the Republicans in Wisconsin, and then expanded nationally to the rest of the US by Bill Clinton in his Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. It was part of his campaign to ‘end welfare as we know it’. Single parents receiving social assistance were required to take low-paying jobs after two years. Legislation was also passed barring people from receiving welfare payments for more than five years in their entire lives.

David Cameron, unsurprisingly, was also a fan of the Wisconsin system, and wanted to introduce it over here. In 2007 he made a speech to the Tory faithful at the party conference, proclaiming ‘We will say to people that if you are offered a job and it’s a fair job and one that you can do and you refuse it, you shouldn’t get any welfare.’ This became part of Coalition policy towards the unemployed when they took power after the 2010 elections.’ Two years later, in 2012, Boris Johnson, speaking as mayor of London, declared that he was going to use EU money from the Social Fund to force young adults between 18 and 24 to perform 13 weeks of labour without pay if they were unemployed. In June that year David Cameron also declared that there was a need to end ‘the nonsense of paying people more to stay at home than to get a job – and finally making sure that work really pays. Ed Miliband’s Labour party also joined in. Liam Byrne, the Shadow Secretary for Work and Pensions, declared that

Labour would ensure that no adult will be able to live on the dole for over two years and no young person for over a year. They will be offered a real job with real training, real prospects and real responsibility … People would have to take this responsibility or lose benefits.

This was echoed by Ed Balls, who said

A One Nation approach to welfare reform means government has a responsibility to help people into work and support for those who cannot. But those who can work must be required to take up jobs or lose benefits as such – no ifs or buts.

Forced Labour for the Unemployed in History

Standing traces the antecedents of workfare back to the English poor law of 1536 and the French Ordonnance de Moulins of twenty years later, which obliged unemployed vagabonds to accept any job that was offered them. He states that the direct ancestor is the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, the infamous legislation that, under the notion of ‘less eligibility’, stipulated that those receiving support were to be incarcerated in the workhouse, where conditions were deliberately made much harsher in order to deter people from seeking state
support, rather than paid work. This attitude is also reflected in contemporary attitudes that, in order to ‘make work pay’, have demanded that welfare support should be much less than that received for paid work. This has meant that welfare payments have become progressively less as the various measure to make the labour market more flexible – like zero hours contracts – drove down wages. The workhouse system was supplemented in 1905 by the Unemployed Workmen Act, supported, amongst others, by Winston Churchill. This directed unemployed young men into labour, so that they should not be ‘idle’ and be ‘under control’. Nor were leading members of the early Labour party averse to the use of force. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, two of the founders of the Fabian Society, were also in favour of sending the unemployed to ‘labour colonies’, chillingly close to the forced labour camps which became such as feature of the Nazi and Communist regimes. Weimar Germany in the 1920s and ’30s also developed a system of voluntary work to deal with the problems of mass unemployment. This was taken over by the Nazis and became compulsory for all Germans from 19-25 as the Reicharbeitsdienst, or Imperial Labour Service It was mainly used to supply labour for German agriculature. Because of its universal nature, the Reicharbeitsdienst had no stigma attached to it, and indeed was seen as part of the new, classless Germany that was being created by Hitler. In a speech to the Service’s workers, Hitler declared that there would be no leader, who had not worked his way up through their ranks. Much harsher was the Nazi’s treatment of the serially unemployed. They were declared arbeitscheu – the German word, which forms the basis of the English ‘workshy’. These individuals were sent to the concentration camps, where they were identified with a special badge on their pyjamas, just like those marking out Jews, gay men, Socialists and trade unionists, and so on.

Liam Byrne also harked back to the Webbs to support his argument for workfare as Labour party policy. He stated

If you go back to the Webb report, they were proposing detention colonies for people refusing to take work … All the way through our history there has been an insistence on the responsibility to work if you can. Labour shouldn’t be any different now. We have always been the party of the responsibility to work as well.

The Workfare Scheme

The result of this is that many unemployed people have been placed on the Mandatory Work Activity – MWA – scheme, which requires them to perform four weeks of unpaid work for a particular company, organisation or charity. The scheme also includes the disabled. Those now judged capable of performing some work are placed in the Work-Related Activity group, and required perform some unpaid labour in order to gain ‘experience’. If they do not do so, they may lose up to 70 per cent of their benefits.

This has created immense fear among the unemployed and disabled. Standing quotes one man with cerebral palsy, who was so afraid of being sanctioned for not performing the mandatory work, that he felt physically sick. Mental health professionals – psychiatrists and psychologists, have also released reports attacking the detrimental effect the stress of these tests are having on the mentally ill. So far they have estimated that upwards of a quarter of a million people with mental health problems such as depression and anxiety have had their condition made worse – sometimes very much worse – through the stress of taking these tests.

The system also affects those in low-paid part-time jobs or on zero hours contracts. These must prove that they are looking for more working hours or a better paid job. If they do not do so, they may lose benefits or tax credits. In 2013 the Tory-Lib Dem government made it even harder for people to claim tax credits by raising the number of working hours a week, for which tax credits could not be claimed, from 16 to 24.

Okay, it wasn’t an outright victory for Jeremy Corbyn. But it wasn’t a defeat either.

Like many people, I was surprised and delighted by last week’s election result. I’d gone to bed early Thursday night, as I couldn’t bear to watch the election coverage. I was afraid that, despite the polls showing that Labour had cut the Tory lead down to only one per cent, there would still be a Tory landslide, or at least a workable majority.

I was, therefore, highly delighted to wake up to find that May had lost her overall majority, and was therefore looking around for anyone or anything that would shore up her government by going into coalition with her.

Unfortunately, she has found one in the Democratic Unionist Party, founded by Ian Paisley in 1986 to oppose the 1986 Anglo-Irish agreement. The DUP is socially Conservative and deeply sectarian. They back teaching Creationism in schools, denying climate change, keeping abortion banned in Ulster and violently denounce gay rights. This goes back to when Ian Paisley in the 1970s founded S.U.S. to oppose the legalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults. The organisation’s name stood for ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’. This always struck me as an hysterical reaction. It’s as if he was afraid that Northern Irish people’s heterosexuality was so fragile, that the moment homosexuality was legalised every man and woman in the province would immediately turn gay. Or else he had some kind of nightmare that gays from across the world were massing at the Irish border or just across the Irish Sea, ready to charge in like an invading army.

Just as worrying is the party’s hatred of the Irish Republic and Roman Catholicism, and its links to a series of Loyalist paramilitary terrorist groups, most notably the UDA. It’s leaders have posed with Kalashnikovs in their mitts, and wearing the uniform of Loyalist terror groups. These links remain strong, despite the DUP’s official rhetoric condemning terrorism in Ulster.

In short, they’re the type of organisation, which several Protestant Ulster people I know came to Britain to get away from. Just as I know Irish Roman Catholics, who don’t want to go back to Ulster because of the same violent prejudice in their communities.

May hasn’t exactly gone into coalition with these clowns. She’s trying to hammer out a ‘supply and confidence’ agreement, in which the DUP will support the government on a bill-by-bill basis. And even that’s looking rocky, and she made the mistake of annoying her new partners in government by announcing the alliance before it was to be formally arrange on Tuesday.

May’s formation of government with these bigots is also something of a problem for many Conservative MPs. About 19, according to Mike, are openly gay, and so put in a very awkward position through this alliance with a rabidly homophobic party. Ruth Davidson, the gay head of the Conservative party, and who is going to marry an Irish Roman Catholic, has already Tweeted her displeasure. Not that this may make any difference. Despite Cameron’s attempts to make the Tories look nice and friendly to minorities – pro-gay, anti-racist, more women MPs – this alliance shows the real nature of much of the Tory party. They’re reverting to type. As for the 19 gay Tory MPs, given the entrenched hypocrisy of the Tories, where the say one thing and do another, it’s likely that they’ll swallow their principles and troop through the ‘Yes’ doors to support the government anyway.

Even with the DUP on board, the Tories only have a bare majority of two. That means that they’ll have to do as Labour did when they only had a majority of five in the mid-70s: cram every single one of their members into the chamber to support them. To the point where they sent the whips round to check no-one was in the toilets.

Far from being ‘strong and stable’, May’s position looks very, very precarious. The Bow group, a Tory think tank, are considering holding leadership elections and there are murmurings from the backbench 1922 Committee. Unfortunately for the Tories – but good for us – all the other contenders for the leadership are actually more unpopular than May. The leading figure is Boris Johnson, but while 23 per cent of people said that he was more likely to make them vote Tory, 33 per cent stated that he’d put them off.

People have started discussing the possibility that there might be another election in October. Mike has put this forward, and suggested that it could be as early as August. And May herself may not last the week.

As for Corbyn, he’s increasingly looking like a prime minister in waiting. This has been the biggest movement towards Labour for the past forty-five years. And it has roundly refuted the claims of his critics that he was ‘unelectable’. Instead, it has confirmed the worst nightmares of the neoliberal establishment – that he is only too electable. The Blairites now have absolutely no grounds for their intrigues against him. Indeed, if Corbyn can do so well despite their attempts to unseat him, it’s probably fair to say that if the Blairites had done the decent thing and supported their leader and the broad mass of the party’s members and supporters, he’d probably be in Number 10.

His success shows that a very large section of the British people are sick of austerity, sick of Thatcherism, sick of the privatisation of the NHS and private ownership of utilities, sick of exorbitant rents, the threat of homelessness, stagnant wagges and a harsh and callous attitude to the poor, the sick, disabled and the unemployed, which has seen them thrown off benefit, to die in misery and despair.

Tony Greenstein, one of the great people, who comments on Mike’s blog, has written on his own that the one thing that Corbyn should not do is water down his policies to make them more acceptable to those inclined to vote Tory. And he’s right. Not only would this leave some of the causes of Britain’s misery in place, it would weaken his own position electorally. People are heartily sick of a Labour party which does its best to emulate the Tories. This was the reason why New Labour lost five million of its supporters from 1997 to its fall, and why Ed Miliband lost the 2015 election.

Corbyn now needs to keep the pressure up – to continue his attack on the Tories. According to Survation, he’s now several points above them in the polls. Let’s hope and do what we can to maintain and increase this lead, until the government falls and we can have a real, Socialist, Labour leader in Downing Street.